Now the first step in our ambitious undertaking here is to distort this girl's face.So for one thing, we need to make her eyes much bigger.And, if you saw the movie, you may recall that their eyes are very wide set, as well.And we need to increase the size of her brow, because the Na'vi in Avatarhad very big brows.At the same time, they have these flat noses.So we're going to have to reduce the size of her nose, tuck the tip of thenose in a little bit.And she is sort of smiling here.

Our final Na'vi is not smiling.He's got a grim, just frank expression, because he's got war-paint on, or shedoes, or whomever, but they're ready for battle.So you may also notice that I've gone ahead and raise the cheekbone a little, afew other structural modifications here, without affecting the hair anymore thanwe have to, because this girl here has the best Na'vi hair on the planet.It's absolutely good to go.So we want to keep it intact.And we want to do the most realistic, credible job possible.

So we're going to brush in our distortions using a command under the Filtermenu called Liquify.Liquify is quite complicated, I'll be honest with you, but it's also extremely fun.And I find when I show this command to students that they leap right in andstart using it, and it helps to break the ice with Photoshop.So it's a good place to start. All right.But before we do that, we need to make a layer.You can see that we have a handful of layers ready to go here inside the layers palette.They're all turned off, except for the Background layer.

So that's the only one with an eyeball in front of it.Now this group of layers here, this little folder, it has an eyeball in front of it as well.But if you twirl it open, by clicking on this little triangle, you'll see thatnone of the layers inside of the folder have their eyeballs turned on.So that's why everything but the base layer, the Background layer here, is invisible.Now this layer is made of pixels, like a standard image layer inside ofPhotoshop or some other program.And that means that I could go to the Filter menu, choose Liquify, and juststart painting away.

However, that's not the best idea, because if something goes wrong and youdiscover it later on down the line, which is the way it always happens.The way things tend to work inside of Photoshop is that you'll apply a big edit,you'll think everything looks great, and then you'll take a break, come back acouple of hours later and start noticing the problems.Once you start noticing those problems, you want to be able to make your wayback to the original image and fix those problems.If you don't have a layer to work with, then you have to back step like crazy,or you have to revert to the original file.

So I might as well protect that original image by duplicating it to a new layer.Here's how you duplicate a layer in the program.You go to the layer menu, you choose New, and you choose this command right there:Layer via Copy, which is somewhat crazy, because it's a terrible name for a command.And it's also hard to get to, because you have to go this New submenu here, andit doesn't particularly make any sense.However, what people tend to do, once you're experienced with the program, youjust press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+J, and that's J for jump.

So if you just think about jumping the layer, you're in good shape.That's Command+J on the Mac.Let me show you how that works.I'm going to escape out of the menu.I've got my Background layer selected.Make sure it is clicked and selected.It is possible not to have any layer selected inside of Photoshop, which willreally throw you at times.You want to click on it, make sure it's blue or some other highlight color, andthen press Ctrl+J or Command+J on the Mac, and look at that.You've got a Background copy.You're ready to go.Now you don't want it to be called Background copy.

I definitely advise you to get in the habit of naming your layers as you go,makes it much easier to sift through a complex file and even a simple one.And especially if somebody else is going to follow in your footsteps, it's greatto have layer names to work with.So all you've got to do to rename a layer is double-click on its existing name,and then I'm going to call this liquify eyes, like so.Then I press the Enter key or the Return key on the Mac in order to acceptthat new layer name.That's all there is to that.Now, I want you to go up to the Filter menu, and I want you to choose thiscommand right there, Liquify, or you can press Ctrl+Shift+X or Command+Shift+Xon the Mac, and it brings up this completely different program that's nowrunning inside of Photoshop.

Notice we have this collection of tools over here on the left-hand side.We have all these Options over here on the right-hand side.And then we have the image ready to paint in the center.And we are going to begin to liquify this image in the next exercise.

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Author

Released

5/7/2010

Photoshop is the world’s most powerful image editor, and it’s arguably the most complex, as well. Fortunately, nobody knows the program like award-winning book and video author Deke McClelland. Join Deke as he explores such indispensable Photoshop features as resolution, cropping, color correction, retouching, and layers. Gain expertise with real-world projects that make sense. Exercise files accompany the course.

Skill Level Beginner

Duration

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Q: While following along to the tutorial, my copy of Bridge does not have the same Export options as shown in the video. Why are these options missing in my copy?

A: For some reason, Bridge CS5 shipped without the Export options. They were included when Bridge updated to version 4.0.1. Updating Bridge will restore the export options.

Q: While following along with the exercises, next to the background layer on my Layers panel \, it shows a brush instead of the small picture, as it does in the video. What can I do to fix this? I erased the exercise files and started over, but it still shows the paintbrush.

A: This will occur if the Layers panel preview is turned off. To fix this, right-click in the empty gray area below the Background layer. Then choose Large Thumbnails. The thumbnail previews should come back immediately.

Q: The instructions for installing the dekeKeys don't work on my computer (which is running Mac OS X Lion). Is there an update to these?

A: The dekeKeys distributed with this course will still work for Lion. You just need to add them to a slightly different folder than in previous versions of OS X.

Open a new Finder window and choose Go > Go to Folder. Type the following file path exactly as written below. Copying and pasting may result in an error.